Quotes

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Man is condemned to be free.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.